H&K VP-70M: Polymer Framed Cutting Edge Machine Pistol from 1973

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons calm I'm in McCollum and I'm here today at the gray room at hk's facility in Ashburn Virginia where we are going to take a look at a bunch of interesting HK firearms in particular today we're taking a look at the vp70 we have both a VP 70 Z the civilian version and much cooler a VP 70 M the military version now this of course is well the elephant in the room here is this big stock hanging off the back of it in classic tradition this is not just a shoulder stock but also a holster for the gun we'll take a look at that up close in a minute and what this does is convert a semi-auto pistol into a three-round burst firing machine pistol personal defense weapon submachine gun type of piece it is I think unique in that the burst mechanism is actually physically built into the stock itself if you take the stock off you no longer have a machine pistol capability it's semi-automatic only unless you add the stock which of course gives you a substantial added controllability factor from having this third point of contact to control the gun and the rate of fire that this gives you is a pretty blistering 2,200 rounds per minute is this what will touch on why they they chose that rate of fire in a minute but a few other things to mention about the vp70 there are several this is a pistol that broke ground in a number of different areas it was for one thing a particularly high capacity pistol for its time and even stands up today with an 18 round magazine capacity now a lot of that is because or is required or certainly a very good idea because of this three round burst mechanism if every trigger pull fires three rounds now you need a pretty large magazine or else it's gonna run empty pretty darn quickly so in burst mode this gives you six trigger pulls that's a start and certainly 18 rounds in 1973 when this thing first went into production was pretty phenomenally hi this is also the first polymer-framed service pistol to ever be produced the the Glock of course would take that concept and really run with it but it would do that about ten years later the vp70 was really the the the very first in that field maybe even a bit ahead of its time there is of course an aluminum chassis molded into that Parliament just as we see done today this was also a double action only striker fired automatic pistol and while it's that's certainly not a first of its kind it was unusual for the time so beyond that it's simple blowback unlike most cousins of this type it doesn't have a locked breech it relies on the weight of the slide the force in the spring and interestingly very deep rifling that actually allows some gas blow by when you fire to help moderate the pressure of 9019 ammunition so all these things put together make for a very economical and fast pistol to produce because the fire mechanism it has very few moving parts the polymer frame makes it easy to mold and manufacture in large quantities the slide is actually made from sheet metal with a couple of welded in blocks this did in fact get its take it's its ideas largely from the Mauser vp70 of world war ii which is of course the vp70 I'm sorry the Mauser VP Volks pistol of world war ii the vp70 being named the same way is not it turns out coincidence so the the primary designer of this gun was a guy named Alex Seidel who was an engineer formerly of Mauser and one of the founding members of HMK all of whom by the way were ex Mauser employees and he really did take that concept from the end of world war two of the stamped sheet metal striker fired Volks pistol and reinvigorated for the Cold War the idea was if Germany got overrun by the Soviet Union in a massive attack through the folder gap they would need something that was cheap and easy to produce and something that could be kind of a stay behind resistance and guerrilla or of firearm and that apparently really was the concept behind the vp70 now it was offered to the German military when it was first introduced the German military never did actually adopt it however they did make a little more than 3,000 of the vp70 M s they then transitioned it into civilian production as a semi-auto only pistol and produced even more of those 23600 and 369 so like twenty three and a half thousand of the semi-auto guns as well and we actually see those in the United States fairly commonly they were sold over here as well as in Germany and other places so let's go ahead and take a look up close at this guy and I'll show you how this actually works with this first firing mechanism all right a couple things to point out first we'll start over here the military guns are marked vp70 M the civilian ones vp70 Z the Z is for civil or civilian you'll notice on the back of the 70 Z frames just have a solid frame where on the back of the military version we have these cutouts for the stock to attach and by the way this particular Z is one of about 400 that were made for the Italian market in 9 by 21 Italy prohibited civilian possession or use of military cartridges and thus on the Italian market civilian pistol market 9 nine-millimeter has been replaced by the 9 by 21 cartridge to get around that restriction also point out the civilian pistol has a cross bolt safety here on the trigger garden the military version does not you can see the button there but this is non-functional on the military version the very heavy double action only trigger is considered sufficient safety all by itself on our holster stock here we have a selector lever for three shot and three-shot bursts and semi-auto and what that does is lift up this little shark fin look and lever we'll take a closer look at that in just a moment first and go ahead and pop that open can to drop her pistol right into it this takes you right back to the days of the teens and 20s when like every new military pistol could be could be acquired with a shoulder stock slash holster now this attaches to a belt using a round peg that drops into either side of the holster this and the sling were offered with with the gun in its military state although I don't have one here to show you basically strap this plate on to your belt or drop like I suppose and then the stock just slides on to it right there so that you can pull the stock off to use it as a shoulder stick if you want to this guy slides right on there to take it off you actually have to have it in single shot position hold the lug back and the stock just slides right off this lug here has a little locking pin now to disassemble the pistol itself pull this locking block down slide comes back up and off bag out and that's all there is to it it is a very simple button to disassemble inside here we have our striker system so the striker is grabbed right there and I can't really pull it back because it's got a very strong spring there is also a spring preventing it from traveling forward so you can see there when I push it forward and firing pin protrudes this is oh this is the normal at rest position of the striker so that that returned spring on it has enough force to prevent this from firing if it is say dropped on its muzzle and then when you fire the reason that this thing has such a long and atrocious trigger pole is that it has to fully [ __ ] the striker back about a centimeter so about four tenths of an inch then it releases it that gives the striker enough power to set off a cartridge and fires if we look at the civilian semi-auto only version here it's very easy to see how that works this sill bit right here grabs the striker and when I pulled the trigger back it's going to pull the striker back until right there at the end of travel it's going to drop right there that dropping releases the striker which then snaps forward and fibers and because if I continue to hold down the trigger because this is still still dropped down it doesn't reenacts as its own disconnect err there's the because the striker rests and it's you know forward position there's no way that this thing can fire a second shot unless I release the trigger to bring this sear forward to where the striker is now resting again and pull it again so that's the semi-auto version it's very simple HK is or was at the time very proud that it only has like four moving parts in it really good design there's our ejector not a whole lot else here that we need to talk about in the military pattern there are a couple extra pieces here but when I just have the pistol they don't do anything so this works the same way we've got our our sear catch right there and it's going to pull the striker back drop down release the striker and fire however if you'll notice we have this little finger that now protrudes out the back of the pistol and we have these two additional sear catches right here note also that there is this little round plunger in the bottom of the back of the pistol frame note that none of these parts exist on the civilian guns so the civilian version is very much a semi-auto the design has been changed substantially to make it semi-auto only in addition to the other bits on the stock we have this little plunger right here and when I put the selector switch into three round first that plunger pushes forward and it is going to push that little round peg in so if I go ahead and fit the stock on then I switch this into three round burst mode this lever lifts up you can't really see it but that plunger is pushing its counterpart in the pistol in and now the functionality changes now when I pull the trigger these two rear catches lift up and what that does it means that when I when when this main trigger based one drops these two are actually going to catch the striker and hold it now this is going to operate a little bit differently first off I've put the slide on here without a spring to show you that every time it cycles it's going to depress that little triangular lever that is an important element of the burst mist mechanism in fact this is basically the burst counter now with the slide back off things are going to work a bit differently so these two catches are lifted up but the strikers forward because the pistol hasn't fired yet so when I pull the trigger the first time it's going to hold the striker back here and release it as as with a semi-auto shot the slide will come back it is going to depress this you can hear it click there then when the slide comes forward there are a pair of angled surfaces in the bottom of the slide that are going to push this down and it'll go down it's not going to lock down it'll it'll drop down long enough to release the slide and then come back up so slide goes forward this fire is shot number two now it's when the slide cycles back after it'll be injecting case number two right now it's going to trip that again you can hear it click again now when I push this down it stays down that was this is now firing shot number three and that's the last shot that we want in our burst so the slides going to cycle backward it'll hit this but this doesn't do anything now it's it's role is done since I'm still holding the trigger down you can now see that all three of these catch surfaces remain in the downward position so the striker is not going to be wreak octant it's not going to fire again until I release the trigger when all of these come back up so shot number one that goes down that shot number two that goes down again now this goes down and stays down that's shot number three and by the way if you do manage to release the trigger before you fired all three rounds the act of releasing the trigger resets all of this so you don't have to worry about the counter you know firing once and twice and then on the next burst only firing one round it will always fire a three round burst regardless of the trigger position on the previous burst I mentioned the two surfaces in the slide that drop that auto sear they are here and here so when those go forward you can see out these two surfaces are lined up with these two and those are angled at the back right there these are angled at the front so you get a nice smooth disengagement which releases the striker so production began on the vp70 in 1973 and as I said about 3200 in fact thirty two hundred and twenty one of these pistols were manufactured they started at serial number 500 they went to 37 31 you can see this one's at the tail end of production now the German military did not adopt this pistol exactly who they were making them for is unclear HK was privately owned at that point and records are a bit unavailable of exactly what their motive was but as a privately owned company certainly they had every right to manufacture a whole bunch of these anticipating a military contract either with Germany or potentially with some other country the civilian copies came afterwards those start at serial number 70,000 and they made a total of twenty-three thousand six hundred and eighty nine of them the one other thing I should point out here is the design of the site because while the rear sight is pretty typical just and open not the front sight is unusual the vp70 front sight uses basically two polished ramps in a dark space in between them to give the illusion of a of a front post of a normal front post so when you look at this thing you can kind of see there that that dark space in the center kind of becomes its own front sight it is really interesting how this actually works in practice it doesn't show up all that well here on camera because of focal length issues but right there you can kind of see it better what looks like a black post in the middle there is actually a shadow with that all said I think it is time for us to head to the range and actually try this out primarily in burst mode you

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 676,637

Rating: 4.9561982 out of 5

Keywords: walther vp, mauser, walther, vp, volkspistol, volkspistole, 9mm, polymer, polymer frame, machine pistol, pdw, pistol, vp70, vp70z, vp70m, military, civilian, semiauto, burst, 3 round burst, full auto, automatic, shoulder stock, mccollum, forgotten weapons, history, development, disassembly, design, staple gun, trigger, awful trigger, blowback, germany, hk, h&k, koch, heckler, 9x19, 9x21, sidearm, handgun, inrange, inrangetv, kasarda

Id: xEMTx5MNqk4

Length: 16min 40sec (1000 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 30 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/CrazyJay10]

Forgotten Weapons is a really neat watch to learn about the weirder firearms that pop up in games sometimes, like this odd number. I got really into watching the videos about 19th century firearms when RDR2 dropped.

[u/PunishedSBFFan]

I didn't think there was any crossover between these fanbases. This subreddit continues to surprise me. Regardless I think we could all use a little Gun Jesus in our lives.

[u/Backupirons]

His video on the g11 was really interesting, turns out I had the wrong idea this whole time, I thought it fired flechettes.

[u/dblackdrake]

Man, gun jesus is the best; All facts, no wierd cryptofacist militia garbage.

[u/fatvallilmer]

He Finally did a video on the g11 a month ago. So excited when that came out

[u/Never_to_speak_again]

I am pretty annoyed that Leon doesn't rack the slide to load the gun when the mag's empty. They animated it so the VP70M doesn't lock back on the last round, which is a detail 99.9% of people won't appreciate since most people don't know the VP70 doesn't have a slide catch. It's definitely noticeable that inserting a new mag and firing without racking the slide just isn't how guns work though.

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It's nitpicky, yeah, but it's strange that one obscure detail is there and a necessary detail isn't.

[u/[deleted]]

although the three-round burst on this thing is less like a traditional vidya three round burst and more like a very quick sneeze of bullets

[u/LexusSinkhole]

For "gun-nuts" this wasnt a surprise even back then when the game came out. The Remington conversion kit is BS however.

[u/JeedyJay]

Resident Evil has always been a series with a lot of gun nut DNA in it.